The new issue of Archipelago, Vol. 4, No. 3 Autumn 2000, is
on-line, and I invite you to read and enjoy it. You will find there a suite
of poems by Rilke, on loss, translated by the American poet Elizabeth
Knies, with the originals in German. Are they not a beautiful counterpoint
to the heartbreak of Autumn?

Christian McEwen, a Scots nature-poet interested in the family memoir,
offers a lovely essay about her late uncle, Rory McEwen, himself a
watercolorist of botanica. Her tact and the delicate restraint of her
writing are exemplary, I feel. Three of Rory McEwen’s paintings of dying
leaves, digitized images, accompany the memoir.

An extraordinary poem by Simin Behbahani, the Persian poet of
lyrical gift who is also a human-rights activist, appears in its graceful
original script, and in translation by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa.
Rather than say more, I urge you to read it, for its lyrical beauty and
political anguish. This is its first publication in English.

Two photos by Thomas Crampton, correspondent for the International
Herald-Tribune, show us a beautiful dancer in the Royal Palace in Cambodia,
and a chilling truckload of soldiers in Burma’s northern Shan State after
the burning of poppy fields. And the bitter irony of Clary Györgyey’s
“Confessions of A Marxist Puppet Master” reminds us of what it is dangerous
to forget: “My puppet-game, my idiocy is not an historical category. I too
had dreams once, with my friends, about the redemption of the world. Now,
at the threshold of manhood, they seem like no more than mere illnesses of
adolescence.”

A villanelle, “The Burden of Silence,” by Renata Treitel, haunts a
reader, like an aftermath.

From London, our occasional correspondent Richard Jones sends his
Letter, “Reforming the Lords,” about the Blair government’s muddled action
to alter that ancient House of Parliament. The honored geographer, sexual
educationist, and life-long Labourite Doreen Massey, a friend of the
author, is made a life peer, and enters the House of Lords. Richard Jones
visits her there and tells us what he observes.

In my “Endnotes” I write of a long-loved book, The Brothers
Karamazov, and the disturbing mixture of high ideals with a kind of
absolutism, portrayed one way in the poem of the Grand Inquisitor, and
another, sadly, in several recent pronouncements by the Vatican.
Finally, the novelists Nikki Gemmell and (encore) Richard Jones
suggest books worth reading, and the editor selects a long passage from a
radiant new work. “Letters to the Editor” and “Resources” point in various
directions and (I think) invite thoughtful response. I welcome you into
this new issue, remind you to take the “Download” edition, and ask you to
let me hear from you,

Once upon a time—it was back in the ’Twenties, to be more exact—on
South Sixth Street in Williamsburg, in the parish of Peter and Paul, in the
Borough of Brooklyn, in Kings County in New York City in the United States
of America, a girl called Alice Rocket sat at a counter drinking a cup of
hot stuff. She had ordered Postum, to save on costs. She had been fired
just the day before.

“I’m a bum," she said. "I am all washed up.” She was fourteen years
old.

A new episode every month, from September till March. Tune in again
in mid-October, for more of Alice’s Adventures Overseas, in the next
installment of AGENT NINE.